Weighted nearest neighbor algorithms for the graph exploration problem on cycles

In the graph exploration problem, a searcher explores the whole set of nodes of an unknown graph. We assume that all the unknown graphs are undirected and connected. The searcher is not aware of the existence of an edge until he/she visits one of its endpoints. The searcher's task is to visit all the nodes and go back to the starting node by traveling a tour as short as possible. One of the simplest strategies is the nearest neighbor algorithm (NN), which always chooses the unvisited node nearest to the searcher's current position. The weighted NN (WNN) is an extension of NN, which chooses the next node to visit by using the weighted distance. It is known that WNN with weight 3 is 16-competitive for planar graphs. In this paper we prove that NN achieves the competitive ratio of 1.5 for cycles. In addition, we show that the analysis for the competitive ratio of NN is tight by providing an instance for which the bound of 1.5 is attained, and NN is the best for cycles among WNN with all possible weights. Furthermore, we prove that no online algorithm to explore cycles is better than 1.25-competitive.